Mesh

* Book: The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing. By Lisa Gansky. Portfolio / Penguin Group, FALL 2010

URL = http://meshing.it/book

Introduction

From the publisher:

" Traditional businesses follow a simple formula: create a product or service, sell it, collect money. But in the last few years a fundamentally different model has taken root - one in which consumers have more choices, more tools, more information, and more peer-to-peer power. Pioneering entrepreneur Lisa Gansky calls it the Mesh and reveals why it will soon dominate the future of business.

Mesh companies create, share and use social media, wireless networks, and data crunched from every available source to provide people with goods and services at the exact moment they need them, without the burden and expense of owning them outright. Gansky reveals how there is real money to be made and trusted brands and strong communities to be built in helping your customers buy less but use more.

Consider the explosive growth of Zipcar. By exploiting the latest technology and making it easy and affordable to have a car whenever you need one, this young company is helping to redefine personal transportation. And deeply worrying established competitors. Gansky shows how the same pattern is playing out with less famous Mesh companies that are reinventing an enormous range of industries." (http://meshing.it/book)

Summary Review

"The "Mesh" describes businesses and organizations that share stuff, fueled in part by the mobile web & social networks. Mesh lifestyles and businesses embrace a world in which access to things trumps owning them. In my book, The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing, I talk about dozens of these new outfits, and why they are growing at such a prodigious rate. There are a couple of thousand more at www.meshing.it.

Well-known examples include car & bike sharing, (Zipcar , B Cycle & GetAround) and vacation home-sharing services. (AirBnB & VRBO). But there are lots of more surprising ideas brought to market -- fashion & craft exchanges, tools libraries, p2p energy, co-working, rooftop farming, p2p money lending, technology driven by sharing, and support for the arts. Mesh companies leverage billions of dollars of investment in tech and physical infrastructure, and are relatively inexpensive to start and run.

For many people, the Mesh will provide opportunities to generate extra income (through "meshing" your possessions on sites that help with all the details), and to save money by only accessing goods and services only when you need them, rather than aspiring to own one of everything. In the next decade, I predict, this model will conspicuously shape how we think about our lives and work and will shake-up the buy-and-throw-away economy. (hint: it already has) By re-using, repairing, and recycling goods, the Mesh also makes sense as the global population zooms toward 9 billion persons." (http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/23/making-sharing-irres.html)

Other Reviews

Kevin Kelly:

"Lisa Gansky has a great start envisioning what meshiness means to businesses in her new book The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing.

Sharing is the new vital verb in society. Not that sharing itself is new, but that the ways, dimensions, amplitude, volume, geography, frequency, span, diversity, and colors of sharing have expanded greatly.

Gansky's framing helped me unify many of the current fashionable strands of change at work in consumerism: social media, the shift away from ownership, the attraction of open-source, viral marketing, and others. I found it helpful. She also supplies a super-duper annotated reference and source list that is itself a book, and worth your while." (http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/04/from_mass_to_me.php?)

Excerpts

Chosen by Kevin Kelly from Lisa Gansky's annotations:

We can increasingly gain convenient access to those goods, greatly reducing the need to own them. Why buy, maintain, and store a table saw or a lawn mower or a car when they are easily and less expensively available to use when we want them?

Mesh businesses share four characteristics: sharing, advanced use of Web and mobile information networks, a focus on physical goods and materials, and engagement with customers through social networks.

One trend is “tryvertising,” where, instead of advertising, companies place products in people’s daily lives. In some cases, people pay a small fee to get samples of new products, and then give feedback to the manufacturer. For only five euros, a Barcelona-based outfit, esloúltimo, allows customers to try out five products for two weeks, including a variety of food, household, and tech products. Tryvertising might be used to listen to a potential market and hone the offer, or simply to determine the market’s preference for owning, as opposed to just using, new tools and services.

All the Mesh businesses rely on a basic premise: when information about goods is shared, the value of those goods increases, for the business, for individuals, and for the community.

Zipcar is a near perfect example of a successful Mesh business. It doesn’t make, sell, or repair cars. It shares them. Zipcar is primarily an information business that happens to share cars.

A recent study by McKinsey concluded that a recommendation from a “trusted source” like a friend or family member was fifty times more likely to persuade someone to buy a product or try a new brand.

The writer Po Bronson notes that a “crisis can actually take people from thinking about what’s next to thinking about what is first.”

Cisco estimates traffic over the Internet will exceed 667 exabytes by 2013. That’s roughly 667 billion gigabytes and equates to a quintupling of traffic from 2009 to 2013. Cisco predicts that one trillion devices will be connected to the Internet by that time.

In a matter of months, Curtis Kimball’s popular Crème Brûlée Cart in San Francisco attracted more than 11,000 followers on Twitter.

There are seven keys to building trust in the Mesh: 1. Say what you do—manage expectations and revisit them frequently. 2. Use trials. 3. Do what you say. 4. Perpetually delight customers. 5. Embrace social networks and go deep. 6. Value transparency, but protect privacy.

More Information

See also the Mesh Business directory